Next February, Cincinnati's Creation Museum will hold a science fair for budding creationists. All students in grades 7-12 are encouraged to apply, provided they agree with Answers in Genesis' Statement of Faith, which includes the following items:

2. The account of origins presented in Genesis is a simple but factual presentation of actual events and therefore provides a reliable framework for scientific research into the question of the origin and history of life, mankind, the Earth and the universe.

3. The various original life-forms (kinds), including mankind, were made by direct creative acts of God. The living descendants of any of the original kinds (apart from man) may represent more than one species today, reflecting the genetic potential within the original kind. Only limited biological changes (including mutational deterioration) have occurred naturally within each kind since Creation.

4. The great Flood of Genesis was an actual historic event, worldwide (global) in its extent and effect.

Thanks J-Walk Blog. After the jump: a sampling of other upcoming events at the Creation Museum, including a screening of a DVD about "the rampant misinformation propagated by ecological alarmists" and a lecture called, intriguingly, "God Didn't Make Any Apemen:"

Most of the money will be spent on turbine-related projects (allocation breakdown after the jump). But Cleantech Blog points out that the biggest obstacle facing wind power is actually pipeline problems:

Look at the study “20% Wind Energy by 2030” released in 2008 by the U.S. Department of Energy to envision the implications of supplying 20% of the nation’s electricity needs by 2030 from wind. Oh, there’s plenty of wind to actually supply the electricity, no problem. It’s just that tons of new transmission capacity would be needed.

And there’s the rub. It’s only marginally easier to site and build a new transmission line than a new nuclear powerplant. Transmission lines take many years and sometimes even decades to get done, due to a variety of NIMBY forces and overlapping regulatory regimes at the local, state and federal levels. And, they cost a fortune, easily a million dollars a mile, often considerably more.

So, that “pipeline” from Dakota to Chicago is on the order of a billion dollars of merely enabling infrastructure – and since there are many pinchpoints in the national power grid, that wind power probably couldn’t go much further than the terminating point anyway.

And that NIMBY thing? Still a problem—and one that stimulus money probably won't solve.

Why abandon this collegiate tradition? According to the NY Times, reasons to hate on trays abound: Washing them requires a lot of water (Williams college has saved 14,000 gallons of water ever year since they shelved trays); they encourage food waste (Rochester Institute of Technology spent 10 percent less on food without trays); and they're ugly.

Some have also speculated that sans trays, students might be too lazy to make multiple trips to the pasta bar (Penne Station, anyone?). But that's really giving college kids the short shrift:

“I like not having to carry a tray around,” said Peter McInerney, a freshman here at Skidmore College, as he grabbed a midafternoon snack of an egg sandwich, pancakes and apple juice.

What that Poäng chair really costs.

FURNITURE USED to be an investment, meant to last a lifetime. But thanks in no small part to IKEA, that's changed. Now we buy bookshelves for $19.99—and feel fine about throwing them away two years later. In her forthcoming book, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, Ellen Ruppel Shell chronicles how the Swedish furniture giant crafted the message that furniture can be affordable and adorable and sustainable. "With its focus on sharp design and Scandinavian élan, its hip, irreverent television commercials, its conspicuously progressive outlook," she says, "IKEA appears to be the anti-Wal-Mart, a classy, high-minded company where value and good values coexist." But do they? IKEA is now the world's third-largest consumer of lumber after Home Depot and Lowe's—and though it likes to tout its sustainable harvesting program, the responsibility of policing the logging has fallen on just 11 forestry monitors. As Mother Jones has reported, up to 25 percent of IKEA's furniture is made with wood culled from the vast forests of northern Russia—an area notorious for illegal logging—and milled in China. There's just too much to keep track of, as one monitor admits in a company report: "It's not possible to be everywhere all the time." The larger point is this: When IKEA says its wood furniture is made from a "renewable material," it reinforces the idea that disposable is okay.

Looking for a distraction? Here's a quick guide to what we read, watched, and listened to in our March/April 2009 issue:

In this age of Google maps (Street View, Earth, et al), it's easy to think that we live in a transparent world. Not quite: In Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World, geographer Trevor Paglen exposes the secret airstrips, extralegal prisons, and bases that the government claims don't exist. Moving from the world of stuff the government doesn't want you to see to stuff you don't want to see, there's the documentary Food, Inc., an eye-opening tour of all the myriad gross things that could happen to your meat—from farm (chickens with breasts so big their legs can't support them) to slaughterhouse (sick cows being tortured before slaughter) to meatpacking plant (a variety of stomach-churning germs)—before it gets to your plate.